Best engineering teams claim awards in “Capture the Flag” tournament

The plenary meeting held on May 24th as part of the International Polytechnic Week culminated in the award ceremony to honor the winners of the student tournament “Capture the flag” organized by Siemence and supported by Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. Memorable souvenirs and Siemence award certificates were presented by vice-president and director of the Department of Science and Technology, Siemens Dr. Martin Gitsels and vice-rector for International Relations of SPbPU Mr. D.G. Arseniev.

The tournament that took place at the Supply Center for International Activity on May 21st-22nd involved over 60 students representing different universities of the city: Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, ITMO university, Saint-Petersburg Electrotechnical University "LETI", The N.G. Kuznetsov Naval Academy. All in all, there were 11 teams participating, eight of which successfully made into the finals.

“Capture the flag” is a brand new type of hackathon where teams are free to choose from a variety of challenges and scores assigned according to their difficulty level. The highest scoring team wins the tournament.

There were two stages of the challenge – a quiz and assignments – both of which require a complex engineering solution. Besides, the participants had an opportunity to test their problem-solving skills with case studies and give a presentation to the Siemence experts. Extra scores were given to teams who presented their case studies in English or developed solutions for different field case studies. Ideas for challenges were generated by Siemence and influenced by the company’s values. They included assignments in the fields of computer science, power engineering, electrical engineering, transport systems, advanced technology and others. The scores gained by each team were displayed on an online platform so that all participants could keep track of their adversaries’ progress.

Holding a 1000-point lead over the other teams, five Polytech students - Dmitry Eliseev, Mikhail Petrov, Kamill Timraleev, Alexander Frolov and Vadim Yaparov – all together making “Sons of Zeus”, finished the tournament first. “Cloud Team” of LETI (Nikita Gavrilov, Sergey Eroshenko, Alexander Muzalevsky) and the sole ITMO representative Oman Abishev were second. The third place went to the team “Un1corn” made up of the Polytech students Evgeny Mutin, Ivan Kononov, Maxim Lerman, Gulnaz Rakhmanova and ITMO student Alexander Kichigin.

“Our victory is due to the high quality education provided by the Institute of Energy and Transport Systems. Our team was able to demonstrate a wide range of professional competencies”, - Kamill Timraleev says about his success at the tournament, - “The big motivation factor was the possibility to undergo training at Siemence”.

All winners will receive a one-time Siemence scholarship award of 5 to 20 thousand rubles, some of the students will be given an opportunity to take a training course at the Siemence Corporate Technologies Department.

For your information::

Siemence and Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic university have been longtime partners. Their cooperation in the fields of science, technology and education began in 1990. Today, several research projects are being carried out in the framework of this partnership. Moreover, starting 2016 a long-term scholarship program for Master’s and PhD’s studies was launched which is meant to provide financial support for the research projects carried out by the science groups of SPbPU .